Chapter XII.—The
Attributes of Goodness and Justice Should Not Be Separated. They are
Compatible in the True God. The Function of Justice in the Divine Being
Described.

Since, therefore, there is this union and
agreement between goodness and justice, you cannot prescribe28532853 Cavere. This is
Oehler’s reading, and best suits the sense of the passage and the
style of our author. their separation. With what face will you
determine the separation of your two Gods, regarding in their separate
condition one as distinctively the good God, and the other as
distinctively the just God? Where the just is, there also exists the
good. In short, from the very first the Creator was both good and also
just. And both His attributes advanced together. His goodness
created, His justice arranged, the world; and in this process it even
then decreed that the world should be formed of good materials, because
it took counsel with goodness. The work of justice is apparent, in the
separation which was pronounced between light and darkness, between day
and night, between heaven and earth, between the water above and the
water beneath, between the gathering together of the sea and the mass
of the dry land, between the greater lights and the lesser, between the
luminaries of the day and those of the night, between male and female,
between the tree of knowledge of death and of life, between the world
and paradise, between the aqueous and the earth-born animals. As
goodness conceived all things, so did justice discriminate them. With
the determination of the latter, everything was arranged and set in
order. Every site and quality28542854 Habitus. of the elements,
their effect, motion, and state, the rise and setting of each, are the
judicial determinations of the Creator. Do not suppose that His
function as a judge must be defined as beginning when evil began, and
so tarnish His justice with the cause of evil. By such considerations,
then, do we show that this attribute advanced in company with goodness,
the author28552855 Auctrice. of all
things,—worthy of being herself, too, deemed innate and natural,
and not as accidentally accruing28562856 Obventiciam. to God,
inasmuch as she was found to be in Him, her Lord, the arbiter of His
works.

2853 Cavere. This is
Oehler’s reading, and best suits the sense of the passage and the
style of our author.